Willis, William

ORAL HISTORY OF WILLIAM (BILL) WILLIS
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
May 14, 2013
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is March [May] 14, 2013. And I am, at my office here in Oak Ridge with Mr. Bill Willis. Mr. Willis, thank you for taking time to talk with us.
MR. WILLIS: Keith, thank you very much. I appreciate you calling me and asking me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, sure. Now, you don't live in Oak Ridge?
MR. WILLIS: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: I don't guess you ever lived in Oak Ridge, but you've had a long association with Oak Ridge.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And we're going to talk a little about that. But, why don't we take just a few minutes and tell me about where you were born and raised and how you ended up in East Tennessee.
MR. WILLIS: Okay, I was born in 1934, January the 1st. I was the first baby born in Little Rock, Arkansas, that year. Had my picture in the paper.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: And, the only good news, good interview I ever got. We moved to Mississippi early after that. Both my parents were native of Mississippi, and they moved back to Mississippi my first year. I grew up on a farm in Mississippi.
And just knew about farm stuff and ended up going to Mississippi State College, and eventually got a degree in civil engineering there. Then three years in the military during the Korean War.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: I went to work for a private contractor. I worked like a migratory fruit picker over the South and Southeast out in Texas and Oklahoma, Louisiana, building big projects, big roads, dams, port on the Mississippi River and so forth. After a few years of that, I had been working seven days a week for a couple of years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And I had decided it was the only way I could make a living and see my wife and children, you know babies. Now, I got an offer at that time from TVA in 1960. They offered me a job at Paradise Steam Plant up in Kentucky, and I thought, “Well, Paradise has got to be better.” I was in the swamps of Louisiana at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure., sure.
MR. WILLIS: I said, “Paradise sounds good to me.” I accepted the job with TVA. They didn't send me to Paradise, they sent me to Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was Paradise?
MR. WILLIS: Paradise is in Kentucky.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, it is a big large coal-fired steam plant up there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WILLIS: I got to Muscle Shoals and I worked on a hydro project, rebuilding some of those, putting some new units in, building new navigation locks down there, and things like that. And then, after nine years of that, I was asked to come to Knoxville, Tennessee, to the headquarters. I got involved in the construction of all of TVA's construction work. I was the assistant manager of all of that. And four or five years later, I moved up to be the assistant manager of engineering, design and construction of all of TVA's work in seven states.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, I got a good bit of experience there. In 1979, the Board of Directors of TVA named me General Manager. The general manager of TVA works directly for the board.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: The board is appointed by Congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And approved by the President. And, they select a general manager to run the organization, and I was that person. They selected me in 1979.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WILLIS: I was in that job from 1979 to 1993.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: So, I saw a great deal of the activity of all of TVA's works between Washington and the valley. Traveled around the world a lot for the State Department and others, talking with countries about doing similar types of things that TVA did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, I had a great career. I couldn't ask for any better. Couldn't have written a better script or had a better time. I retired in 1993 from TVA and I set up my own small company to help assist start-ups mostly in the Oak Ridge area here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WILLIS: I was looking at technology start-ups and I got involved with that. And stayed in that type of work for about eight years. My wife's illness then, I needed to be with her full time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And so I narrowed my outside work down to a little of nothing. And so, that's it. I did help start up some companies here in Oak Ridge. Pro2Serve is one of the ones. That's doing well here, and another one called American Technologies. They left here and went back to Vietnam several years ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. Let me ask you about when you, when you first came to, I guess, Knoxville. What did you know about Oak Ridge? I mean, what did you know [of] the history and its history with TVA?
MR. WILLIS: Well, I became a student of TVA's history when I first came to work with them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WILLIS: I really was interested in them. So, I knew the early history with TVA, and heard about a big bunch of power plants to get a big load of power in here to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: For the Manhattan Project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And so, I knew about that. I hadn't had any direct association with anybody in Oak Ridge before that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WILLIS: All I knew about it was what I read in literature.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: After I got to Knoxville, I began making some associations with some the managers, and engineers, and scientists in the area, so I came and started becoming more closely attached to the Oak Ridge community in the mid ‘70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And from that time on I had a good bit of association with them.
MR. MCDANIEL: What were some of the relationships and some of the things you worked on with either Oak Ridge or the plants or the city, or between TVA.
MR. WILLIS: My early experience with them was after I was General Manager of TVA. We had a lot of negotiations over power contracts, you know, the Gaseous Diffusion Plant required tons of power.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, the relationship was providing that power at the right time, and the right quantity, and so forth. There came a time when the cost of power became an issue of keeping the Gaseous Diffusion Plant open, so I had a lot of interface negotiations with the people who were running the facilities at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And that was an interesting time.
MR. MCDANIEL: When was that? That was mid ‘70s?
MR. WILLIS: That would have been the…
MR. MCDANIEL: Mid to late ‘70s?
MR. WILLIS: Late ‘70s, early ‘80s yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: That timeframe, late ‘70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because they basically turned K-25…
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: …off about ’85.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess, ‘85 or ‘86.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, there were issues between TVA providing power, or power coming from Joppa plant up in Illinois, up in Cairo Plant, up there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Portsmouth plant. So, there were a lot of issues around that. So, I interfaced with the community over here pretty well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Though I interfaced with, interestingly enough with the city community, and county community officials, as well as the officials from the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: And manufacturing facilities out here in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: They were worried about losing jobs, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, of course.
MR. WILLIS: Naturally, they would be. So I was interfaced with them quite a bit.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now who did you deal with?
MR. WILLIS: Gene Joyce was one of them, was a lawyer here for many years, and he's very prominent on working for this community to create jobs and keep more industry coming in. Keep the plant getting more and more appropriations from congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Tom Hill from the Oak Ridger owned that for a while. I talked with the people in the plant would be George Jasney. He was in engineering at the time. I talked to some of the other plant managers. So I had a lot of again to get acquainted with them. Not only from a business standpoint, but then I got sort of socially interested in helping them try to work on the future of Oak Ridge, how we could really take advantage of all the talent and knowledge and what we had out here in science and turn that into commercial companies and jobs. We got to talking about that in the mid ‘80s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: I got involved with bringing a company in from Utah. There's the Utah Innovation Center, the first innovation center in the nation. And I got out, went out there to talk with those people, and got them involved in coming down here and building a large building innovation center over here just right the other side of Commerce Park.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And sold it, I think, one of the new contractors has its headquarters in the building now.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was the innovation center? What did they do?
MR. WILLIS: They used to take individuals that had come up with a new concept for commercialization and wanted to build a new company around it to give them a facility to come into to give them some business and financial assistance.
MR. MCDANIEL: Kind of like an incubator?
MR. WILLIS: Yes, an incubator type.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: They had support facilities. They had some financial help and to help them get up on their feet, and hopefully help them to become a company.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: That was the idea.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, after that I got involved with Tech 20/20 out here to get that built over in Commerce Park.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: Get that going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Tom Rogers was the first head of that. Worked for me at TVA for a good many years in economic development.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, Jeff Deardorff, who did a lot work out here trying to commercialize K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. The Heritage Center.
MR. WILLIS: The Heritage Center and the land group that did that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And he's involved in that a good while. So, I got involved with those things, and of course, I got involved with three or four or five companies out here to help them move, either move along further or get started and get up and get going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, I spent a lot of time out here, from the mid ‘80s to the time I retired in ‘93. I was with TVA. I was using whatever I could bring from TVA to the table to assist economic development.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: One of those things, by the way, was with Mayor Bissell.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. Tell me about that. What was he like?
MR. WILLIS: He was, he would do a good job of P.T. Barnum of Running Circus. He was just very innovative. You know, he knew how to get things out of people. He knew who the power brokers were and how to work those power brokers, and make things happen. He was a great resource for the breaking away from the kind of Atomic City area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: To breaking away into Oak Ridge being a viable community and city.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: And he had that in his mind and he did that well. I remember one time he just came in my office one day in Knoxville, didn't have an appointment, but walked in wanted to talk to me, so I brought him in. We had a good discussion. He told me about this idea the community had of building this rowing complex. Starting he said, “We got this TVA, you know, and Melton Lake up here. We got this big flat place across the river there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: “You know, no big ripples in the water; greatest place in the United States to build a concept,” and they needed some money to get started and they was wanting to build this starting point where all…
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: …The row boats or boats, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Or, whatever they call them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Lined up and got started off on the regular turning point, and so on, but he didn't, I saw he didn't have any money for his budget. So, I recall I gave him the first twenty-five thousand dollars to go on the project to get him going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that's still going.
MR. WILLIS: It was like we just invited the world with him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I bet.
MR. WILLIS: Our relationship was just super with him after [that].
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet it was. I bet it was.
MR. WILLIS: That was a lot of fun. Two guys I worked with that were good were Tom Hill and, I can't remember his name. I think it was his last name was Matthews. He was a banker head of one of the banks here. He's since retired and moved back to North Carolina. But they were working hard on me to do something, to do something at TVA to make some adjustments to keep the power rates down low enough, you know. So they wouldn't have to shut down here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: So finally, I got their attention, I think. It was a little controversial at the time. I said, “Look, what you need to start doing at this point in time, you got a dinosaur out here in this plant. And you need to drop the dinosaur and start picking up what we can make out of all this talent we got out here in technology how we can really exploit that.” And make this commercial center you know, a high technology commercial center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: That the commercial sector picks up jobs and other economic things around here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And we need to get started on that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because that's going to take a long time.
MR. WILLIS: It's going to take a long time to go. We got, you know, the raw resources here. We just got to get on it and start the work. Pretty soon after that we started to work on trying what can we do to exploit this technology. One of the first companies to spin out of the Lab was ORTEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And that name was Tom Yount. He was one of the guys who brought it out of the Lab. Making the radiation detectors and things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And that was one of the first ones. And then we just started picking up on others and doing what we could to support those people that came out. Burt Ackerman, Technology for the Energy Corporation. Very close friend of mine. Worked with him on helping get his operation going on out on the parkway. On the Parkway out here, Pellissippi Parkway I worked with state people and David Patterson, who used to be a Planning Director for TVA. He became head of Tennessee Technology Foundation, and I was on the board of that thing. We worked to get that Parkway concept set up, just get that land rights set up, that we could get reserved for these technology companies.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: To start up. That was a good program to work on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I bet it was.
MR. WILLIS: And with that I worked with a lot of different people here, that helped. Most of the ones who started up on the Parkway on there, I had some affiliation with them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: In fact, I have a son who works for one of them now. He's an electrical engineer. He lives here in Oak Ridge with my daughter-in-law, my grand-daughter, and great-grand-daughter all live here in Oak Ridge. So, I spent a lot of time in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, well, that's good. That's good.
MR. WILLIS: So, I've had that kind relationship with the community. And I was on the board of directors of Oak Ridge Associate Universities for a number of years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, are you?
MR. WILLIS: When I worked there Jon Vogel was there the head of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. WILLIS: And I worked, that's a super, super asset the community has, and really a super asset the country. Has affiliations with, I forget how many universities are affiliated with it now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, it's like ninety or a hundred by now.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, and they have a tremendous budget now, and they do a lot of work for the Department of Energy. And other energy, atomic type, nuclear.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Type energy studies.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And things that they do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: I enjoyed that. I think I was there for about 6 years on that board.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were you?
MR. WILLIS: So, I got to know all the people in that. The university types and so forth. I also worked with the joint venture things between UT and Oak Ridge companies. So, I had mangled around and messed around people's business out here a good bit for a number of years. And I've totally enjoyed it. It's just such a resource here. The people, of course, are the main resource. You had unbelievable people, but I was a close friend of Alvin Weinberg. I've got a story about him I'd like to tell you.
MR. MCDANIEL: Please do.
MR. WILLIS: He was head of the Lab, Director of the Lab at the time. This must have been in the mid ‘80s. I can't remember the date exactly, and I was invited to come down to Santiago, Chile, the capital, the University of San Santiago to give a talk at the International Nuclear Engineering Conference. People from all over the world were there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, so they invited me to come down and give a talk about TVA where it is, where it's going in nuclear, and so forth. What are the issues.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, I did that. I went out the morning I was to give my talk. I got up there and they had, I don't know how many different countries, but they had simultaneous interpretation of your talk. Everybody out in the audience had earphones on and they could get direct translation of…
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: Stuff translated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: And, that was a little fun, because when it got through they said they were going to let people ask me questions. Well, back in the back I couldn't see too well. I couldn't tell where it was coming from. They said I had a question out here. And, so this guy gets up, I couldn't see who he was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right.
MR. WILLIS: He's blurred, so, and asked me, Mr. Willis and he asked me the most complicated question you could think of about nuclear reactors. I'm not a reactor engineer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: I know something about, you know, but I don't know stuff like this question he asked me. Well, as soon as he asked me that question I recognized who he was.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was Alvin Weinberg.
MR. WILLIS: It was Alvin Weinberg sitting back there, and he did that just to devil me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh...
MR. WILLIS: And he asked me that question and it turns out that it was something that he had recently written an article about. It was in technical magazine. And, I had read it. So, I said, “Well, Dr. Weinberg,” I said, “you are the person that's the best known talent in that field. You recently wrote an article about it. It was the best thing I've ever read.” I said, “You're the expert in that and I couldn't improve on your answer to it at all. Next question.”
MR. MCDANIEL: That's good. You got him.
MR. WILLIS: And after that he had a lot of fun about it. After he and his wife invited me for dinner down there in Santiago and we had a good visit.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, good. That's good.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, he was just going to stick a stake through my heart right there.
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. He was famous for asking his questions from what I understand.
MR. WILLIS: I used to do a lot of hiking with Tom Yount and George Jasney, George was the head of Engineering with Union Carbide.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Yount had his own company. And anyway, I had a lot of relations with him. We used to go hiking over in the mountains. They were hikers. I wasn't a hiker.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: They'd take me and drag me up these mountains and just about kill me. So, I got to know them as interesting people. Those two guys like to get up at Mount LeConte up there, and sit up on a boulder and look out over the valleys. They wouldn't talk about people. They wouldn't talk about things. You know, like, “How's the nuclear program going?” They wouldn't talk about individuals. They wanted to talk about ideas. New ideas. And that's what we'd do. We'd go up there and sit a day and talk about things that never had been done or what areas we should get involved in and so forth. That was a fascinating experience. Those two guys are super-brains.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Wow.
MR. WILLIS: And a lot of fun to be around.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet. Well, it sounds to me like you had an interesting relationship with the folks in Oak Ridge.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Since you did mention that you are kind of a TVA historian.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Talk a little about the very early days when Oak Ridge came, when they came and created Oak Ridge.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell us, talk about the relationship with TVA, as a matter of fact, you might tell the part a little bit about the construction of Norris Dam.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah. Norris Dam wasn't too much of an issue with building a plant out here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: TVA and I were conceived at the same time in about April of 1933. April of 1933 was when Congress was voting on it.
MR. MCDANIEL: No?
MR. WILLIS: I can assume they approved it and the President approved it May of 1933. I say that is when TVA was conceived and I was, it was the same time that I was conceived.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: I was born nine months later from that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, how funny.
MR. WILLIS: At the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: At the time that I was born, they poured the first concrete on Norris Dam.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: George Norris is the one they named the dam for. He's a Senator from Nebraska. He was very interested in and he had tried for several years to get a TVA-type act through Congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: Through a Republican Party.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: President Hoover didn't like it. He vetoed it the first time Congress had approved, he vetoed it. He brought it up a couple years later. Congress passed it again. And he vetoed it again.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: When Roosevelt came in, in 1933, Roosevelt was trying to find projects and things that could stimulate the economy as quickly as possible.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Senator Norris took that project to him and told him how many jobs and how many things he could do and how they could lift this part of the country, which was about 4/10th of the per person per capita income against the rest of the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And they wanted to get this part of the country off taking money from the government and producing money for the government…
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: … and the country. So he got that through and passed it, and then five months later they put an organization together to start work on building the Norris Plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was the first one?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, that was the first one. And the next plant they started was down in Alabama. A dam down there, Wheeler. And it had been started by the Corps of Engineers and then dropped…
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: …during the Depression. So they wanted to get, they wanted to kind of start working on both ends. They wanted the real problems taken care of which was flood control and navigations. They wanted to get that working in. They needed to work on both ends at once. They started up here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And then the other mountain projects as well as down at the bottom bringing it back up. And, they were moving along real fast getting that done real fast. It started in ‘34, and interestingly enough, the first power they got was out of Wilson Dam. The War Department had built Wilson Dam in the 1917 to 1920 era.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: To start a plant to make munitions for World War I.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And they got the plant finished, they build the dam, Wilson Dam with hydro units. They build the dam for making nitrates, ammonium nitrates. And got all that ready to go, but the war was over and they never did produce any at that time for the military purposes, but that had some arguments at that time. George Norris was in it arguing for government programs; Henry Ford wanted to build a plant down there he wanted to build automobiles on it, and it's like he essentially wanted them to give him the power plant and everything out there so he could do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And there was big fight going on out there just like going on today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: There was as big fight going on over private versus public.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: That argument went on until finally the signing of it in 1933, ended that argument on that issue.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: One of the first directors of TVA was the president of the University of Tennessee at the time. He was an agricultural specialist and one of the first things he did was start developing new fertilizers for the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WILLIS: They developed new chemistry in the labs, make and test plants and build big manufacturing plants. Put it out on test farms to try it out. And did that all over the country, and when I left TVA, TVA owned 75 per cent of all the patents on fertilizer in the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Also owned all the patents on the fertilizer manufacturing facilities to do it. That transferred all that to private sector.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: As the private sector wanted to get involved.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: It totally created the fertilizer industry in the United States out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
MR. MCDANIEL: TVA did that?
MR. WILLIS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: Then the war years came along, and the TVA act has a section in there. TVA will be at the mercy, or whatever, to be available for the War Department to use anyway they want to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: During the war.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: So the war comes along and so they got TVA to really start pushing power in areas where they could build manufacturing facilities. A big airplane plant in Nashville. The big barge and ship building thing in Decatur, Alabama.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And other munitions plants around it in different places. So, there was a lot of that was going on. Along comes the early 1940s, when the Manhattan Project was conceived in Washington and put together after they got testing done up in the stadium in Chicago. They wanted a place that had certain specifications that they could build big fusion plants.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, the bomb and enrichment building plants. So, they literally looked to working with TVA. TVA had two things. It had the precise right kind of area: this land down here between two big ridges where you could secure it real well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, they also, TVA is the one outfit in the country that had enough electricity that they would have to have to run the thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: So, that zoned right in. TVA earliest involvement - there's not anything written about it except a few places you can't hardly get to, but TVA had gone through a tremendous amount of buying land for these projects.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: They had a process set up and it worked real well. So, I don't know. It wasn't the local people with the…
MR. MCDANIEL: So did the…
MR. WILLIS: …military people then got TVA through the land buyer department to go out and, and buy most of this land.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So the TVA land buyers came in-
MR. WILLIS: They got out and the reason they wanted to do that is they wanted people to think this was just another TVA project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Part of the idea was to keep down what it was really about.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: I don't know if TVA got involved in some of, there was a lot of houses and facilities built here for the people coming into this remote area to work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. WILLIS: TVA had experience in that and building at their plants, Fontana, and different plants around. We built cities in ours. Built towns that had complete cities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: You know, everything.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, we didn't get directly involved in it, but they got somewhat involved in it with that. I'm not really sure what yet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: I can't find that. I've been trying to find it written down.
MR. MCDANIEL: I've never heard that, and I've heard a lot about Oak Ridge history.
MR. WILLIS: So we did a lot of that and interestingly enough we built several plants around there and in Norris and some up in the mountains and different places close. And TVA had trained a lot of craftsmen. Tons, and tons of craftsmen for that work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Then I had a lot of construction supervisors and superintendents had done it, so they were able to bring a lot of that talent in who knew how it is. It was kind of like digging holes, pouring concrete and building buildings, and building a power plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WILLIS: So, TVA contributed indirectly, contributed a lot of labor too by people who had trained at TVA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, of course. Of course.
MR. WILLIS: A lot of people in the early days went to work. We were fortunate at TVA when we started we didn't have any people. Most our higher engineering and management came off the, I'm going to say it in a minute. The waterway across the Northern part of the country. What was that called?
MR. MCDANIEL: I don't know.
MR. WILLIS: Anyway, it was a major shipping channel across. The Saint Lawrence Seaway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh.
MR. WILLIS: A lot of those people worked on that project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. WILLIS: And when that project was over engineers and managers couldn't get jobs anywhere in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: TVA just came up overnight and wanted thousands of people, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah.
MR. WILLIS: They all came down here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: To start, so, the Manhattan Project was able to take advantage of all that labor and management out of TVA and engineering.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: And, that was a benefit to help start. And, eh, that's it. We had some interesting political issues. There was wanting to be a…
MR. MCDANIEL: Fontana, wasn't it?
MR. WILLIS: No, it wasn't Fontana, Douglas Dam. We built, we built…
MR. MCDANIEL: Cherokee.
MR. WILLIS: Fontana for the war effort for the aluminum industry.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. That was mainly for Alcoa, wasn't it?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, mainly for that. But they, we had some plants around but we needed more power, particularly in the early ‘50s. They really needed a lot more. And, eh, TVA surveyed around and they decided the best place, and the closest place was to build the Douglas Dam.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And, had a Senator who didn't want to do that. Kefauver didn't want to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Kefauver.
MR. WILLIS: He fought it everywhere. He was head of the Appropriation Committee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure.
MR. WILLIS: And he fought it tooth and nail, tooth and nail. It went to the President. And, the big issue TVA said that's the best place. He wanted to do it in a few more places that said it cost a lot more, take a whole lot longer to do it. They could do that one fast. They got the power here cheapest of any.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, finally the President backed Kefauver off after a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did he?
MR. WILLIS: And, told TVA to proceed forth with, which they started, and completed it thirteen months.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know.
MR. WILLIS: Isn't that amazing?
MR. MCDANIEL: That's, that's good.
MR. WILLIS: Like today what that would take to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's kind of like Cherokee.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Cherokee they completed pretty…
MR. WILLIS: Pretty…
MR. MCDANIEL: Quickly. And from my understanding, I believe it's accurate, to say, they built it because they knew there, it may be needed it for the war effort.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: They finished it December 5, 1941.
MR. WILLIS: That happened, I think on a munitions plant up that area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that what it was?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: December 5th, 1941, two days before Pearl Harbor.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah. That's probably a munitions plant. Anyway, those kind of interfaces, and since the middle ‘80s it's mostly been, you know, working with them on projects, you know. They work with us on the Breeder Project. We were going to build it down here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: And, I was on the board of directors for the Breeder Project and we worked with the commonwealth out of Chicago, and the AEC, or something else it was called at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And, others to get that built out here. Even dug a hole for it, started a foundation work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WILLIS: And, I'm pretty sure, and then, the federal funding backed away from it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And when the federal funding backed away from it the utility funding backed away, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: And, I was hoping that one day we'd need a Breeder plant. We needed some way to take all the fuel that waste fuel that we got out there now, that are storing at the plants.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: We haven't been able to get the national center for storing it...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: …approved. It's been half built. I don't know if it will ever be used, but it'd be nice to be able to have a Breeder type concept that could take the waste fuel and turn it into run a Breeder program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: So, maybe one day they will do that. I don't know.
MR. MCDANIEL: What has been the relationship between TVA and the nuclear power industry in Oak Ridge? Or, has there been.
MR. WILLIS: A lot of our early people that we got were trained out here on the reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: You know, the sodium whatever.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. I know.
MR. WILLIS: Anyway, I had people in age that came to TVA, that came as operators and managers. So, we got a lot of technical talent out of it. We stay involved with any of their research going on. We do a lot of research for the nuclear industry.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Of course.
MR. WILLIS: They tied in with the power in the United States energy, electric power research organization, out on the West coast.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Floyd Cutler who was out here, one of the managers of the facilities at one time. He went out there to manage that program. A research program for many years. So, we have a lot of associations with him. And, we started a wing of that out here on Technology Parkway for Electronics Power Resource Center. They were doing a lot of high quality, you know, how do you get high quality electricity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: They've been doing it; they got a lot of employees out there now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Oh, wow.
MR. WILLIS: Unbelievable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: So, we got that brought in here. Anything in Oak Ridge fusion, anything else that comes along we, we're interested in it. We participate anyway. We let them know they can come in our facilities and test things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: It's a good relationship.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, it's been a good, it’s been kind of a good synergy.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Between TVA and the technology development.
MR. WILLIS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: At Oak Ridge, hasn't it?
MR. WILLIS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Over the years. From the beginning.
MR. WILLIS: A lot of environmental research they do out is been a benefit to TVA.
And TVA has participated in that through the years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. I understand. You mentioned Dr. Weinberg, and you mentioned some other folks that you had good personal relationships with that you worked with. Were there other folks in kind of Oak Ridge that were leadership positions in Oak Ridge that you worked with, or you have good stories about? It's always interesting to hear stories about folks.
MR. WILLIS: I'm trying to remember here. Percy Brewington who was head of the Breeder Project out here, I worked with Percy. He was on a couple boards of directors with me, of a couple companies we started up. He's retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Like I missed Gene Joyce.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now he was…
MR. WILLIS: If it involved Oak Ridge, you know, if I was involved in anything about Oak Ridge he was going to be there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: He was involved with anything promoting Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: He did a great job. A good story about him, he was telling me one day that he graduated up North somewhere and got his law degree and came down here and settled in Oak Ridge to start his law practice. Well, his father I think was a lawyer, too. And didn't like the idea at all. He's looking for him to be a more prominent company somewhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: A big corporate lawyer and all that, and he wasn't all that too fond of him coming down here, but had gotten used to it. Gene, Eugene, had set up his practice out here and had it going and his father came down to visit him. And during the course of the visit they were, drove over to Nashville for some event he and his father drove over there, and they were over here past Kingston and started up the hill up there to some project they were work on over there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And it had a lot of convict labor working on some stuff, and had to stop and detour and work their way through real slow.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, they came up close to a work crew, their windows were down and they had to stop. There was one guy who’s a convict on the work crew looked up and said, “Hey, look there! There's my lawyer!” And his dad looked at him and said, “Did you represent this guy?” And he says, “Yeah, I did.” And he says, “You're not as good a lawyer as I thought you are.”
MR. MCDANIEL: That's hilarious.
MR. WILLIS: And, that really did embarrass him in front of his dad.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's funny.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: That is funny.
MR. WILLIS: He was just a great, great energy guy. Services. You know, doing anything that was good for people or good for the community, and he had a political contacts and in Nashville and Washington, that were superior to anyone else this area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure..
MR. WILLIS: And, he knew how to use them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: And, of course, Tom Hill, the editor. He was a great community leader, too, at that Oak Ridger. Did a super job through the years. They were critics when they needed to be, of course. But he, and his family donated a lot of their wealth to try to make this a better place for all of the people living here. He really did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: I played golf with him. I played golf with him, and I can't remember that banker's name, I don't know why I can't remember it. But, at any rate, they played golf with him a lot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have any, I imagine you had some dealing with Senator Baker. I mean…
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me a little bit about that.
MR. WILLIS: Well, I knew him as a Senator before he got to be the Senator.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Of course. Of course.
MR. WILLIS: And powerful when he was, you know, he became, the President brought him in to be the Chief of Staff and stuff up there. And he's just super. To me he was about the last true United States Statesman. And, the Congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: He was for this country. Now, he was Republican. He did his job for the Republicans.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: But, when it came down to making a decision he put that aside and he made the decision to what to support and how to guide it through Congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Of what would be best for the United States at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And he was just, very good at it, and I don't know anybody, and in Congress who has been more revered than him by all his colleagues.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Everybody up there just totally did a super job as head of the, you know, the top Republican, in the Senate. He controlled them pretty well. And got them doing pretty good stuff at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did, you know throughout, since the inception of TVA the beginning of TVA, you know at Norris Dam, through the years, there's always been, it's kind of been a, I don't want to call it a political hot potato, but it's always had its, it's detractors as well as its supporters.
MR. WILLIS: It started out that way before even TVA started. They had a fight over should the government be doing this, or should they give it to the private enterprise. It's still going on today. I know you noticed in the paper recently: the President's budget that he put out, he brought up a thing that they ought to look to selling TVA to the private sector and taking that money to help reduce the debt and so forth...
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: …which won't do it, which won’t help him any.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: But, it comes up and when I was in TVA, I was General Manager and Chief Operating Manager. I faced that about every ten years or so.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you really?
MR. WILLIS: Me up in Washington testifying and so forth. And, I, I testified a lot in Washington, I spent a lot of time in Washington.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. WILLIS: One of the funniest ones was a Senator from New Hampshire. He was an ex-pilot. And, I won't tell his name.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: But, he was mad at us about something, we didn't even know why. But, I think he was just wanted to make an issue and get a big hearing on TV, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, so he summoned the board of directors to come up there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And, as usual, in cases like this, the board denied, decided they wouldn't go and sent me. So, I go on up there, and the Senator, he set it up and notified the press and they had about ten cameras and everything set up. All the key outfits you know to film the thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, I go in by myself. He's up there and none of his colleagues came in.
MR. MCDANIEL: He was there.
MR. WILLIS: I was having to look up at him.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, it was you and him.
MR. WILLIS: Me and him. And, he came in and the first thing he said is, “Well,” he says, “I don't know why but the directors of TVA chose not to come up here, and they sent Mr. Bill Willis up here whose the chief gunslinger for the Tennessee Vampire Authority.”
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Absolutely. That's the way it started.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Oh, my. No. This is not going to go good.
MR. MCDANIEL: This is not going to go good, huh?
MR. WILLIS: But we had it, he about fifteen minutes asking me stuff. I think I it took me fifteen minutes to answer the first question.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. Of course.
MR. WILLIS: And, at any rate he just threw up his hands and because right during the time I was talking all those cameras got up and left.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, was that right?
MR. WILLIS: All the press just got up and left. And, that just really tore him apart. He did it for the press, and it just flopped.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. Oh my goodness.
MR. WILLIS: It was funny, but a lot, a lot of fun. I was always a pleasure to have Howard Baker in front of you. He's a total supporter of you.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: If you stumble a little he'd pick you up.
MR. MCDANIEL: He'd pick you up. That's, that's good. What do you see for the future of TVA and of Oak Ridge and this whole area? I mean realistically.
MR. WILLIS: The future of the Lab out, of course, depends on how the Department of Energy fares…
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: …and, what happens to them. It's always suspect. A lot of people are always trying to do something about that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, that's an issue that will impact the community a great deal and TVA. I probably see more pressure in the future for privatizing or doing something else. I have some, I think, some affiliation with not-for-profit what they call a G&T, Generation and Transmission Organization. The current TVA and all of their distributors out there in the valley their hundred and forty some distributors are affiliated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Bonding together as a G&T and separating themselves from the government.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Totally.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: There big G&Ts out there in this country and there's a model already there and that way TVA wouldn't change very much that way. I'm a supporter of the Tennessee River and contributors tributaries as the backbone of TVA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: You wouldn't have any power plants if it weren't for that river.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: You got to have the water. You do the transportation aspect and all that's been developed and some of the best clear, best good water reservoirs and rivers in the world, and managed rivers in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: You set up for integrated resource development concept; it's been built and managed that way since. There's a danger of trying to make TVA just a power company where it's public or private, power unit power outfit. And the attention of the quality and the value of that river would deteriorate over time. You know, the country can't get together and do anything about rebuilding and maintaining its infrastructure across the country, TVA is infrastructure particularly targeted for this cause.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: …along this river. So, I'm trying to start a campaign over at TVA and retirees, principles that manufacture, and municipalities, you know that river is their life blood, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. WILLIS: And let's grab ahold of that before it is too late. To insure that we find some structure or method of making sure that that river stays the backbone of this region.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And produces what it can contribute to produce and even do more. There is more that can be done with the river.
MR. MCDANIEL: And TVA is kind of always being the caretaker…
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: …of the Tennessee River. I mean, they've been they've been the one that's felt responsible for the Tennessee River.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, back when I was there to the time some were wanting to get TVA away from any appropriation, appropriations to work on the Works Projects. Power systems always finance themselves.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: The public work navigation system, recreation, forestry, fertilizer, all of these other things it was appropriated money sent down and TVA didn't pay it back. TVA paid back the money the government has put into it for the power system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And not only that, but they have paid it back from day one, up to date. And they also go out into the market and sell bonds, revenue bonds like any other private company to finance the new stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So that Congress decided, about in ‘94 or ‘95 time frame, that some people in Congress wanted to stop making appropriations to TVA all together.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: Time they were getting about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and sixty million dollars a year to maintain all of this stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, so, TVA then had to get out of it. So, we picked it up in the power system maintaining the river and the appropriations part of the river and what's in charge of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And they’re doing that out of the power money now. They didn't have to do that before, but they’re doing that now. And, that could be a dicey issue in a future.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: A private company probably wouldn't pick that up.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, at any rate, that's a danger out in the future. This community is with a fair amount of support out of Washington to make this one of their top premiere research institutions in the nation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: If they continue to do that like they have that is nothing but good news for TVA because you'll see even more and more private companies spring out of that research and stuff that's doing here. They want to stay close to the research people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And their building in this area so I see continued growth, but I don't see any more big government paid institution.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WILLIS: But I don't see that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And that's, those things, are kind of the path unless we get into a major depression, again.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: The dams all blow up and we have to rebuild all those dams.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: I say TVA’s future is mostly the power, and keeping the power up. They are trying to do as much as they can to get more efficient and get more use of the power so they won't have to spend so much high cost capital to build new facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. WILLIS: From about the middle ‘60s, early ‘70s the whole economics of power development in the valley changed. Up until about 1965 every new facility brought online, every new facility lowered the cost of electricity to the costumers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WILLIS: After that time with every plant that was brought on increased the price.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: To the people using the power locally.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Past users and new user.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, it's a lot of questions about what our future power electrical sources will be. And, the thing you want to do is cut down as much as you can on having to build high capital cost facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, the only way you can do that is to get the current users of electricity to find more efficient ways to use it so they lower the units of kilowatts and demand another system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And, at the same time try to find a way to make electricity more efficient the power producing plants to produce more.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: Well, another thing, at about the end of the ‘60s the economy of scale from the time they first started up to 1960 they built bigger and bigger plants. And the economy of scale made electricity after that, it leveled off. No more increase in size of plants from then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: Another thing on the power end of it. TVA used to brag up through the ‘60s into the ‘70s that the people of the Tennessee Valley are the highest users of electricity per capita of any place in the nation. That was good because they got things cheaper, they could do more. More is going on, but now as the cost of power goes up you don't want to use that metric anymore.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: You want them to be the lowest users of electricity in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, that metric that we used to brag on we don't brag on that anymore. We want to say now we are the most efficient user of electricity because what we are trying to do now is avoid having to make big capital expenditures to renew facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Because it's going to cost more.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, that's a big change that occurred sometime around 1970. We've continued working on and I think they are doing a good, a real good job on that right now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. So, since you retired as General Manager what, and you said you spent about eight years or so in the private sector. But you're still involved in TVA.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And Oak Ridge.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, I do some talks for them. They get me to go do talks or I still get called on to say, why did you all make that stupid decision back when you were [in charge].
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: It's causing me a problem today.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure. Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: But, I do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Some things you can't live down.
MR. WILLIS: I just recently went to Memphis and gave a talk to the National Civil Engineers organizations in Memphis to a big crowd.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: I had a lot of fun doing that. I do the thing like the documentary. I got involved in that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. WILLIS: And, I got some more coming up, I forgot what they are. But occasionally they'll call for me when they can't find anyone who can remember what happened, you know, say, “Why? What went on there? Who did what?”
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Usually I was involved in it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, how funny. That's good. Well, thank you so much for taking to talk to me this afternoon.
MR. WILLIS: I really enjoyed it. I look forward to seeing your documentary. You got an unbelievable pile of wealth and knowledge over here to help you put together a great story. It's a community of just unbelievable talent, and knowledge, and so forth.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: You're going to have a good time doing this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
MR. WILLIS: Okay.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mr. Willis’ request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORAL HISTORY OF WILLIAM (BILL) WILLIS
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
May 14, 2013
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is March [May] 14, 2013. And I am, at my office here in Oak Ridge with Mr. Bill Willis. Mr. Willis, thank you for taking time to talk with us.
MR. WILLIS: Keith, thank you very much. I appreciate you calling me and asking me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, sure. Now, you don't live in Oak Ridge?
MR. WILLIS: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: I don't guess you ever lived in Oak Ridge, but you've had a long association with Oak Ridge.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And we're going to talk a little about that. But, why don't we take just a few minutes and tell me about where you were born and raised and how you ended up in East Tennessee.
MR. WILLIS: Okay, I was born in 1934, January the 1st. I was the first baby born in Little Rock, Arkansas, that year. Had my picture in the paper.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: And, the only good news, good interview I ever got. We moved to Mississippi early after that. Both my parents were native of Mississippi, and they moved back to Mississippi my first year. I grew up on a farm in Mississippi.
And just knew about farm stuff and ended up going to Mississippi State College, and eventually got a degree in civil engineering there. Then three years in the military during the Korean War.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: I went to work for a private contractor. I worked like a migratory fruit picker over the South and Southeast out in Texas and Oklahoma, Louisiana, building big projects, big roads, dams, port on the Mississippi River and so forth. After a few years of that, I had been working seven days a week for a couple of years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And I had decided it was the only way I could make a living and see my wife and children, you know babies. Now, I got an offer at that time from TVA in 1960. They offered me a job at Paradise Steam Plant up in Kentucky, and I thought, “Well, Paradise has got to be better.” I was in the swamps of Louisiana at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure., sure.
MR. WILLIS: I said, “Paradise sounds good to me.” I accepted the job with TVA. They didn't send me to Paradise, they sent me to Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was Paradise?
MR. WILLIS: Paradise is in Kentucky.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, it is a big large coal-fired steam plant up there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WILLIS: I got to Muscle Shoals and I worked on a hydro project, rebuilding some of those, putting some new units in, building new navigation locks down there, and things like that. And then, after nine years of that, I was asked to come to Knoxville, Tennessee, to the headquarters. I got involved in the construction of all of TVA's construction work. I was the assistant manager of all of that. And four or five years later, I moved up to be the assistant manager of engineering, design and construction of all of TVA's work in seven states.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, I got a good bit of experience there. In 1979, the Board of Directors of TVA named me General Manager. The general manager of TVA works directly for the board.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: The board is appointed by Congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And approved by the President. And, they select a general manager to run the organization, and I was that person. They selected me in 1979.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. WILLIS: I was in that job from 1979 to 1993.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: So, I saw a great deal of the activity of all of TVA's works between Washington and the valley. Traveled around the world a lot for the State Department and others, talking with countries about doing similar types of things that TVA did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, I had a great career. I couldn't ask for any better. Couldn't have written a better script or had a better time. I retired in 1993 from TVA and I set up my own small company to help assist start-ups mostly in the Oak Ridge area here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WILLIS: I was looking at technology start-ups and I got involved with that. And stayed in that type of work for about eight years. My wife's illness then, I needed to be with her full time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And so I narrowed my outside work down to a little of nothing. And so, that's it. I did help start up some companies here in Oak Ridge. Pro2Serve is one of the ones. That's doing well here, and another one called American Technologies. They left here and went back to Vietnam several years ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. Let me ask you about when you, when you first came to, I guess, Knoxville. What did you know about Oak Ridge? I mean, what did you know [of] the history and its history with TVA?
MR. WILLIS: Well, I became a student of TVA's history when I first came to work with them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WILLIS: I really was interested in them. So, I knew the early history with TVA, and heard about a big bunch of power plants to get a big load of power in here to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: For the Manhattan Project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And so, I knew about that. I hadn't had any direct association with anybody in Oak Ridge before that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WILLIS: All I knew about it was what I read in literature.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: After I got to Knoxville, I began making some associations with some the managers, and engineers, and scientists in the area, so I came and started becoming more closely attached to the Oak Ridge community in the mid ‘70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And from that time on I had a good bit of association with them.
MR. MCDANIEL: What were some of the relationships and some of the things you worked on with either Oak Ridge or the plants or the city, or between TVA.
MR. WILLIS: My early experience with them was after I was General Manager of TVA. We had a lot of negotiations over power contracts, you know, the Gaseous Diffusion Plant required tons of power.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, the relationship was providing that power at the right time, and the right quantity, and so forth. There came a time when the cost of power became an issue of keeping the Gaseous Diffusion Plant open, so I had a lot of interface negotiations with the people who were running the facilities at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And that was an interesting time.
MR. MCDANIEL: When was that? That was mid ‘70s?
MR. WILLIS: That would have been the…
MR. MCDANIEL: Mid to late ‘70s?
MR. WILLIS: Late ‘70s, early ‘80s yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: That timeframe, late ‘70s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because they basically turned K-25…
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: …off about ’85.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess, ‘85 or ‘86.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, there were issues between TVA providing power, or power coming from Joppa plant up in Illinois, up in Cairo Plant, up there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Portsmouth plant. So, there were a lot of issues around that. So, I interfaced with the community over here pretty well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Though I interfaced with, interestingly enough with the city community, and county community officials, as well as the officials from the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: And manufacturing facilities out here in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: They were worried about losing jobs, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, of course.
MR. WILLIS: Naturally, they would be. So I was interfaced with them quite a bit.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now who did you deal with?
MR. WILLIS: Gene Joyce was one of them, was a lawyer here for many years, and he's very prominent on working for this community to create jobs and keep more industry coming in. Keep the plant getting more and more appropriations from congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Tom Hill from the Oak Ridger owned that for a while. I talked with the people in the plant would be George Jasney. He was in engineering at the time. I talked to some of the other plant managers. So I had a lot of again to get acquainted with them. Not only from a business standpoint, but then I got sort of socially interested in helping them try to work on the future of Oak Ridge, how we could really take advantage of all the talent and knowledge and what we had out here in science and turn that into commercial companies and jobs. We got to talking about that in the mid ‘80s.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: I got involved with bringing a company in from Utah. There's the Utah Innovation Center, the first innovation center in the nation. And I got out, went out there to talk with those people, and got them involved in coming down here and building a large building innovation center over here just right the other side of Commerce Park.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And sold it, I think, one of the new contractors has its headquarters in the building now.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was the innovation center? What did they do?
MR. WILLIS: They used to take individuals that had come up with a new concept for commercialization and wanted to build a new company around it to give them a facility to come into to give them some business and financial assistance.
MR. MCDANIEL: Kind of like an incubator?
MR. WILLIS: Yes, an incubator type.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: They had support facilities. They had some financial help and to help them get up on their feet, and hopefully help them to become a company.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: That was the idea.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, after that I got involved with Tech 20/20 out here to get that built over in Commerce Park.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: Get that going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Tom Rogers was the first head of that. Worked for me at TVA for a good many years in economic development.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, Jeff Deardorff, who did a lot work out here trying to commercialize K-25.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. The Heritage Center.
MR. WILLIS: The Heritage Center and the land group that did that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And he's involved in that a good while. So, I got involved with those things, and of course, I got involved with three or four or five companies out here to help them move, either move along further or get started and get up and get going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, I spent a lot of time out here, from the mid ‘80s to the time I retired in ‘93. I was with TVA. I was using whatever I could bring from TVA to the table to assist economic development.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: One of those things, by the way, was with Mayor Bissell.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. Tell me about that. What was he like?
MR. WILLIS: He was, he would do a good job of P.T. Barnum of Running Circus. He was just very innovative. You know, he knew how to get things out of people. He knew who the power brokers were and how to work those power brokers, and make things happen. He was a great resource for the breaking away from the kind of Atomic City area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: To breaking away into Oak Ridge being a viable community and city.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: And he had that in his mind and he did that well. I remember one time he just came in my office one day in Knoxville, didn't have an appointment, but walked in wanted to talk to me, so I brought him in. We had a good discussion. He told me about this idea the community had of building this rowing complex. Starting he said, “We got this TVA, you know, and Melton Lake up here. We got this big flat place across the river there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: “You know, no big ripples in the water; greatest place in the United States to build a concept,” and they needed some money to get started and they was wanting to build this starting point where all…
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: …The row boats or boats, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Or, whatever they call them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Lined up and got started off on the regular turning point, and so on, but he didn't, I saw he didn't have any money for his budget. So, I recall I gave him the first twenty-five thousand dollars to go on the project to get him going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that's still going.
MR. WILLIS: It was like we just invited the world with him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I bet.
MR. WILLIS: Our relationship was just super with him after [that].
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet it was. I bet it was.
MR. WILLIS: That was a lot of fun. Two guys I worked with that were good were Tom Hill and, I can't remember his name. I think it was his last name was Matthews. He was a banker head of one of the banks here. He's since retired and moved back to North Carolina. But they were working hard on me to do something, to do something at TVA to make some adjustments to keep the power rates down low enough, you know. So they wouldn't have to shut down here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: So finally, I got their attention, I think. It was a little controversial at the time. I said, “Look, what you need to start doing at this point in time, you got a dinosaur out here in this plant. And you need to drop the dinosaur and start picking up what we can make out of all this talent we got out here in technology how we can really exploit that.” And make this commercial center you know, a high technology commercial center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: That the commercial sector picks up jobs and other economic things around here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And we need to get started on that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because that's going to take a long time.
MR. WILLIS: It's going to take a long time to go. We got, you know, the raw resources here. We just got to get on it and start the work. Pretty soon after that we started to work on trying what can we do to exploit this technology. One of the first companies to spin out of the Lab was ORTEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And that name was Tom Yount. He was one of the guys who brought it out of the Lab. Making the radiation detectors and things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And that was one of the first ones. And then we just started picking up on others and doing what we could to support those people that came out. Burt Ackerman, Technology for the Energy Corporation. Very close friend of mine. Worked with him on helping get his operation going on out on the parkway. On the Parkway out here, Pellissippi Parkway I worked with state people and David Patterson, who used to be a Planning Director for TVA. He became head of Tennessee Technology Foundation, and I was on the board of that thing. We worked to get that Parkway concept set up, just get that land rights set up, that we could get reserved for these technology companies.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: To start up. That was a good program to work on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I bet it was.
MR. WILLIS: And with that I worked with a lot of different people here, that helped. Most of the ones who started up on the Parkway on there, I had some affiliation with them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: In fact, I have a son who works for one of them now. He's an electrical engineer. He lives here in Oak Ridge with my daughter-in-law, my grand-daughter, and great-grand-daughter all live here in Oak Ridge. So, I spent a lot of time in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, well, that's good. That's good.
MR. WILLIS: So, I've had that kind relationship with the community. And I was on the board of directors of Oak Ridge Associate Universities for a number of years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, are you?
MR. WILLIS: When I worked there Jon Vogel was there the head of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. WILLIS: And I worked, that's a super, super asset the community has, and really a super asset the country. Has affiliations with, I forget how many universities are affiliated with it now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, it's like ninety or a hundred by now.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, and they have a tremendous budget now, and they do a lot of work for the Department of Energy. And other energy, atomic type, nuclear.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Type energy studies.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And things that they do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: I enjoyed that. I think I was there for about 6 years on that board.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were you?
MR. WILLIS: So, I got to know all the people in that. The university types and so forth. I also worked with the joint venture things between UT and Oak Ridge companies. So, I had mangled around and messed around people's business out here a good bit for a number of years. And I've totally enjoyed it. It's just such a resource here. The people, of course, are the main resource. You had unbelievable people, but I was a close friend of Alvin Weinberg. I've got a story about him I'd like to tell you.
MR. MCDANIEL: Please do.
MR. WILLIS: He was head of the Lab, Director of the Lab at the time. This must have been in the mid ‘80s. I can't remember the date exactly, and I was invited to come down to Santiago, Chile, the capital, the University of San Santiago to give a talk at the International Nuclear Engineering Conference. People from all over the world were there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, so they invited me to come down and give a talk about TVA where it is, where it's going in nuclear, and so forth. What are the issues.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, I did that. I went out the morning I was to give my talk. I got up there and they had, I don't know how many different countries, but they had simultaneous interpretation of your talk. Everybody out in the audience had earphones on and they could get direct translation of…
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: Stuff translated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: And, that was a little fun, because when it got through they said they were going to let people ask me questions. Well, back in the back I couldn't see too well. I couldn't tell where it was coming from. They said I had a question out here. And, so this guy gets up, I couldn't see who he was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right.
MR. WILLIS: He's blurred, so, and asked me, Mr. Willis and he asked me the most complicated question you could think of about nuclear reactors. I'm not a reactor engineer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: I know something about, you know, but I don't know stuff like this question he asked me. Well, as soon as he asked me that question I recognized who he was.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was Alvin Weinberg.
MR. WILLIS: It was Alvin Weinberg sitting back there, and he did that just to devil me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh...
MR. WILLIS: And he asked me that question and it turns out that it was something that he had recently written an article about. It was in technical magazine. And, I had read it. So, I said, “Well, Dr. Weinberg,” I said, “you are the person that's the best known talent in that field. You recently wrote an article about it. It was the best thing I've ever read.” I said, “You're the expert in that and I couldn't improve on your answer to it at all. Next question.”
MR. MCDANIEL: That's good. You got him.
MR. WILLIS: And after that he had a lot of fun about it. After he and his wife invited me for dinner down there in Santiago and we had a good visit.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, good. That's good.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, he was just going to stick a stake through my heart right there.
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. He was famous for asking his questions from what I understand.
MR. WILLIS: I used to do a lot of hiking with Tom Yount and George Jasney, George was the head of Engineering with Union Carbide.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Yount had his own company. And anyway, I had a lot of relations with him. We used to go hiking over in the mountains. They were hikers. I wasn't a hiker.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: They'd take me and drag me up these mountains and just about kill me. So, I got to know them as interesting people. Those two guys like to get up at Mount LeConte up there, and sit up on a boulder and look out over the valleys. They wouldn't talk about people. They wouldn't talk about things. You know, like, “How's the nuclear program going?” They wouldn't talk about individuals. They wanted to talk about ideas. New ideas. And that's what we'd do. We'd go up there and sit a day and talk about things that never had been done or what areas we should get involved in and so forth. That was a fascinating experience. Those two guys are super-brains.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Wow.
MR. WILLIS: And a lot of fun to be around.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet. Well, it sounds to me like you had an interesting relationship with the folks in Oak Ridge.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Since you did mention that you are kind of a TVA historian.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Talk a little about the very early days when Oak Ridge came, when they came and created Oak Ridge.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell us, talk about the relationship with TVA, as a matter of fact, you might tell the part a little bit about the construction of Norris Dam.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah. Norris Dam wasn't too much of an issue with building a plant out here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: TVA and I were conceived at the same time in about April of 1933. April of 1933 was when Congress was voting on it.
MR. MCDANIEL: No?
MR. WILLIS: I can assume they approved it and the President approved it May of 1933. I say that is when TVA was conceived and I was, it was the same time that I was conceived.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: I was born nine months later from that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, how funny.
MR. WILLIS: At the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: At the time that I was born, they poured the first concrete on Norris Dam.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: George Norris is the one they named the dam for. He's a Senator from Nebraska. He was very interested in and he had tried for several years to get a TVA-type act through Congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: Through a Republican Party.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: President Hoover didn't like it. He vetoed it the first time Congress had approved, he vetoed it. He brought it up a couple years later. Congress passed it again. And he vetoed it again.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: When Roosevelt came in, in 1933, Roosevelt was trying to find projects and things that could stimulate the economy as quickly as possible.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Senator Norris took that project to him and told him how many jobs and how many things he could do and how they could lift this part of the country, which was about 4/10th of the per person per capita income against the rest of the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And they wanted to get this part of the country off taking money from the government and producing money for the government…
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: … and the country. So he got that through and passed it, and then five months later they put an organization together to start work on building the Norris Plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was the first one?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, that was the first one. And the next plant they started was down in Alabama. A dam down there, Wheeler. And it had been started by the Corps of Engineers and then dropped…
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: …during the Depression. So they wanted to get, they wanted to kind of start working on both ends. They wanted the real problems taken care of which was flood control and navigations. They wanted to get that working in. They needed to work on both ends at once. They started up here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And then the other mountain projects as well as down at the bottom bringing it back up. And, they were moving along real fast getting that done real fast. It started in ‘34, and interestingly enough, the first power they got was out of Wilson Dam. The War Department had built Wilson Dam in the 1917 to 1920 era.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: To start a plant to make munitions for World War I.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And they got the plant finished, they build the dam, Wilson Dam with hydro units. They build the dam for making nitrates, ammonium nitrates. And got all that ready to go, but the war was over and they never did produce any at that time for the military purposes, but that had some arguments at that time. George Norris was in it arguing for government programs; Henry Ford wanted to build a plant down there he wanted to build automobiles on it, and it's like he essentially wanted them to give him the power plant and everything out there so he could do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And there was big fight going on out there just like going on today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: There was as big fight going on over private versus public.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: That argument went on until finally the signing of it in 1933, ended that argument on that issue.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: One of the first directors of TVA was the president of the University of Tennessee at the time. He was an agricultural specialist and one of the first things he did was start developing new fertilizers for the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WILLIS: They developed new chemistry in the labs, make and test plants and build big manufacturing plants. Put it out on test farms to try it out. And did that all over the country, and when I left TVA, TVA owned 75 per cent of all the patents on fertilizer in the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Also owned all the patents on the fertilizer manufacturing facilities to do it. That transferred all that to private sector.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: As the private sector wanted to get involved.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: It totally created the fertilizer industry in the United States out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
MR. MCDANIEL: TVA did that?
MR. WILLIS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: Then the war years came along, and the TVA act has a section in there. TVA will be at the mercy, or whatever, to be available for the War Department to use anyway they want to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: During the war.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: So the war comes along and so they got TVA to really start pushing power in areas where they could build manufacturing facilities. A big airplane plant in Nashville. The big barge and ship building thing in Decatur, Alabama.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And other munitions plants around it in different places. So, there was a lot of that was going on. Along comes the early 1940s, when the Manhattan Project was conceived in Washington and put together after they got testing done up in the stadium in Chicago. They wanted a place that had certain specifications that they could build big fusion plants.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, the bomb and enrichment building plants. So, they literally looked to working with TVA. TVA had two things. It had the precise right kind of area: this land down here between two big ridges where you could secure it real well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, they also, TVA is the one outfit in the country that had enough electricity that they would have to have to run the thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: So, that zoned right in. TVA earliest involvement - there's not anything written about it except a few places you can't hardly get to, but TVA had gone through a tremendous amount of buying land for these projects.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: They had a process set up and it worked real well. So, I don't know. It wasn't the local people with the…
MR. MCDANIEL: So did the…
MR. WILLIS: …military people then got TVA through the land buyer department to go out and, and buy most of this land.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So the TVA land buyers came in-
MR. WILLIS: They got out and the reason they wanted to do that is they wanted people to think this was just another TVA project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Part of the idea was to keep down what it was really about.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: I don't know if TVA got involved in some of, there was a lot of houses and facilities built here for the people coming into this remote area to work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. WILLIS: TVA had experience in that and building at their plants, Fontana, and different plants around. We built cities in ours. Built towns that had complete cities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: You know, everything.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, we didn't get directly involved in it, but they got somewhat involved in it with that. I'm not really sure what yet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: I can't find that. I've been trying to find it written down.
MR. MCDANIEL: I've never heard that, and I've heard a lot about Oak Ridge history.
MR. WILLIS: So we did a lot of that and interestingly enough we built several plants around there and in Norris and some up in the mountains and different places close. And TVA had trained a lot of craftsmen. Tons, and tons of craftsmen for that work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Then I had a lot of construction supervisors and superintendents had done it, so they were able to bring a lot of that talent in who knew how it is. It was kind of like digging holes, pouring concrete and building buildings, and building a power plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WILLIS: So, TVA contributed indirectly, contributed a lot of labor too by people who had trained at TVA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, of course. Of course.
MR. WILLIS: A lot of people in the early days went to work. We were fortunate at TVA when we started we didn't have any people. Most our higher engineering and management came off the, I'm going to say it in a minute. The waterway across the Northern part of the country. What was that called?
MR. MCDANIEL: I don't know.
MR. WILLIS: Anyway, it was a major shipping channel across. The Saint Lawrence Seaway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh.
MR. WILLIS: A lot of those people worked on that project.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. WILLIS: And when that project was over engineers and managers couldn't get jobs anywhere in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: TVA just came up overnight and wanted thousands of people, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah.
MR. WILLIS: They all came down here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: To start, so, the Manhattan Project was able to take advantage of all that labor and management out of TVA and engineering.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: And, that was a benefit to help start. And, eh, that's it. We had some interesting political issues. There was wanting to be a…
MR. MCDANIEL: Fontana, wasn't it?
MR. WILLIS: No, it wasn't Fontana, Douglas Dam. We built, we built…
MR. MCDANIEL: Cherokee.
MR. WILLIS: Fontana for the war effort for the aluminum industry.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. That was mainly for Alcoa, wasn't it?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, mainly for that. But they, we had some plants around but we needed more power, particularly in the early ‘50s. They really needed a lot more. And, eh, TVA surveyed around and they decided the best place, and the closest place was to build the Douglas Dam.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And, had a Senator who didn't want to do that. Kefauver didn't want to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Kefauver.
MR. WILLIS: He fought it everywhere. He was head of the Appropriation Committee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure.
MR. WILLIS: And he fought it tooth and nail, tooth and nail. It went to the President. And, the big issue TVA said that's the best place. He wanted to do it in a few more places that said it cost a lot more, take a whole lot longer to do it. They could do that one fast. They got the power here cheapest of any.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, finally the President backed Kefauver off after a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did he?
MR. WILLIS: And, told TVA to proceed forth with, which they started, and completed it thirteen months.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know.
MR. WILLIS: Isn't that amazing?
MR. MCDANIEL: That's, that's good.
MR. WILLIS: Like today what that would take to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's kind of like Cherokee.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Cherokee they completed pretty…
MR. WILLIS: Pretty…
MR. MCDANIEL: Quickly. And from my understanding, I believe it's accurate, to say, they built it because they knew there, it may be needed it for the war effort.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: They finished it December 5, 1941.
MR. WILLIS: That happened, I think on a munitions plant up that area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that what it was?
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: December 5th, 1941, two days before Pearl Harbor.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah. That's probably a munitions plant. Anyway, those kind of interfaces, and since the middle ‘80s it's mostly been, you know, working with them on projects, you know. They work with us on the Breeder Project. We were going to build it down here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: And, I was on the board of directors for the Breeder Project and we worked with the commonwealth out of Chicago, and the AEC, or something else it was called at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And, others to get that built out here. Even dug a hole for it, started a foundation work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WILLIS: And, I'm pretty sure, and then, the federal funding backed away from it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And when the federal funding backed away from it the utility funding backed away, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: And, I was hoping that one day we'd need a Breeder plant. We needed some way to take all the fuel that waste fuel that we got out there now, that are storing at the plants.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: We haven't been able to get the national center for storing it...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: …approved. It's been half built. I don't know if it will ever be used, but it'd be nice to be able to have a Breeder type concept that could take the waste fuel and turn it into run a Breeder program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: So, maybe one day they will do that. I don't know.
MR. MCDANIEL: What has been the relationship between TVA and the nuclear power industry in Oak Ridge? Or, has there been.
MR. WILLIS: A lot of our early people that we got were trained out here on the reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: You know, the sodium whatever.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. I know.
MR. WILLIS: Anyway, I had people in age that came to TVA, that came as operators and managers. So, we got a lot of technical talent out of it. We stay involved with any of their research going on. We do a lot of research for the nuclear industry.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Of course.
MR. WILLIS: They tied in with the power in the United States energy, electric power research organization, out on the West coast.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Floyd Cutler who was out here, one of the managers of the facilities at one time. He went out there to manage that program. A research program for many years. So, we have a lot of associations with him. And, we started a wing of that out here on Technology Parkway for Electronics Power Resource Center. They were doing a lot of high quality, you know, how do you get high quality electricity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: They've been doing it; they got a lot of employees out there now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Oh, wow.
MR. WILLIS: Unbelievable.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. WILLIS: So, we got that brought in here. Anything in Oak Ridge fusion, anything else that comes along we, we're interested in it. We participate anyway. We let them know they can come in our facilities and test things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: It's a good relationship.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, it's been a good, it’s been kind of a good synergy.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Between TVA and the technology development.
MR. WILLIS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: At Oak Ridge, hasn't it?
MR. WILLIS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Over the years. From the beginning.
MR. WILLIS: A lot of environmental research they do out is been a benefit to TVA.
And TVA has participated in that through the years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. I understand. You mentioned Dr. Weinberg, and you mentioned some other folks that you had good personal relationships with that you worked with. Were there other folks in kind of Oak Ridge that were leadership positions in Oak Ridge that you worked with, or you have good stories about? It's always interesting to hear stories about folks.
MR. WILLIS: I'm trying to remember here. Percy Brewington who was head of the Breeder Project out here, I worked with Percy. He was on a couple boards of directors with me, of a couple companies we started up. He's retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Like I missed Gene Joyce.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now he was…
MR. WILLIS: If it involved Oak Ridge, you know, if I was involved in anything about Oak Ridge he was going to be there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: He was involved with anything promoting Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: He did a great job. A good story about him, he was telling me one day that he graduated up North somewhere and got his law degree and came down here and settled in Oak Ridge to start his law practice. Well, his father I think was a lawyer, too. And didn't like the idea at all. He's looking for him to be a more prominent company somewhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: A big corporate lawyer and all that, and he wasn't all that too fond of him coming down here, but had gotten used to it. Gene, Eugene, had set up his practice out here and had it going and his father came down to visit him. And during the course of the visit they were, drove over to Nashville for some event he and his father drove over there, and they were over here past Kingston and started up the hill up there to some project they were work on over there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And it had a lot of convict labor working on some stuff, and had to stop and detour and work their way through real slow.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, they came up close to a work crew, their windows were down and they had to stop. There was one guy who’s a convict on the work crew looked up and said, “Hey, look there! There's my lawyer!” And his dad looked at him and said, “Did you represent this guy?” And he says, “Yeah, I did.” And he says, “You're not as good a lawyer as I thought you are.”
MR. MCDANIEL: That's hilarious.
MR. WILLIS: And, that really did embarrass him in front of his dad.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's funny.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: That is funny.
MR. WILLIS: He was just a great, great energy guy. Services. You know, doing anything that was good for people or good for the community, and he had a political contacts and in Nashville and Washington, that were superior to anyone else this area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure..
MR. WILLIS: And, he knew how to use them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: And, of course, Tom Hill, the editor. He was a great community leader, too, at that Oak Ridger. Did a super job through the years. They were critics when they needed to be, of course. But he, and his family donated a lot of their wealth to try to make this a better place for all of the people living here. He really did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: I played golf with him. I played golf with him, and I can't remember that banker's name, I don't know why I can't remember it. But, at any rate, they played golf with him a lot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have any, I imagine you had some dealing with Senator Baker. I mean…
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me a little bit about that.
MR. WILLIS: Well, I knew him as a Senator before he got to be the Senator.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Of course. Of course.
MR. WILLIS: And powerful when he was, you know, he became, the President brought him in to be the Chief of Staff and stuff up there. And he's just super. To me he was about the last true United States Statesman. And, the Congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: He was for this country. Now, he was Republican. He did his job for the Republicans.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: But, when it came down to making a decision he put that aside and he made the decision to what to support and how to guide it through Congress.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Of what would be best for the United States at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And he was just, very good at it, and I don't know anybody, and in Congress who has been more revered than him by all his colleagues.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Everybody up there just totally did a super job as head of the, you know, the top Republican, in the Senate. He controlled them pretty well. And got them doing pretty good stuff at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did, you know throughout, since the inception of TVA the beginning of TVA, you know at Norris Dam, through the years, there's always been, it's kind of been a, I don't want to call it a political hot potato, but it's always had its, it's detractors as well as its supporters.
MR. WILLIS: It started out that way before even TVA started. They had a fight over should the government be doing this, or should they give it to the private enterprise. It's still going on today. I know you noticed in the paper recently: the President's budget that he put out, he brought up a thing that they ought to look to selling TVA to the private sector and taking that money to help reduce the debt and so forth...
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: …which won't do it, which won’t help him any.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: But, it comes up and when I was in TVA, I was General Manager and Chief Operating Manager. I faced that about every ten years or so.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you really?
MR. WILLIS: Me up in Washington testifying and so forth. And, I, I testified a lot in Washington, I spent a lot of time in Washington.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. WILLIS: One of the funniest ones was a Senator from New Hampshire. He was an ex-pilot. And, I won't tell his name.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: But, he was mad at us about something, we didn't even know why. But, I think he was just wanted to make an issue and get a big hearing on TV, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, so he summoned the board of directors to come up there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And, as usual, in cases like this, the board denied, decided they wouldn't go and sent me. So, I go on up there, and the Senator, he set it up and notified the press and they had about ten cameras and everything set up. All the key outfits you know to film the thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, I go in by myself. He's up there and none of his colleagues came in.
MR. MCDANIEL: He was there.
MR. WILLIS: I was having to look up at him.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, it was you and him.
MR. WILLIS: Me and him. And, he came in and the first thing he said is, “Well,” he says, “I don't know why but the directors of TVA chose not to come up here, and they sent Mr. Bill Willis up here whose the chief gunslinger for the Tennessee Vampire Authority.”
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Absolutely. That's the way it started.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: Oh, my. No. This is not going to go good.
MR. MCDANIEL: This is not going to go good, huh?
MR. WILLIS: But we had it, he about fifteen minutes asking me stuff. I think I it took me fifteen minutes to answer the first question.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. Of course.
MR. WILLIS: And, at any rate he just threw up his hands and because right during the time I was talking all those cameras got up and left.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, was that right?
MR. WILLIS: All the press just got up and left. And, that just really tore him apart. He did it for the press, and it just flopped.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. Oh my goodness.
MR. WILLIS: It was funny, but a lot, a lot of fun. I was always a pleasure to have Howard Baker in front of you. He's a total supporter of you.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: If you stumble a little he'd pick you up.
MR. MCDANIEL: He'd pick you up. That's, that's good. What do you see for the future of TVA and of Oak Ridge and this whole area? I mean realistically.
MR. WILLIS: The future of the Lab out, of course, depends on how the Department of Energy fares…
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: …and, what happens to them. It's always suspect. A lot of people are always trying to do something about that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, that's an issue that will impact the community a great deal and TVA. I probably see more pressure in the future for privatizing or doing something else. I have some, I think, some affiliation with not-for-profit what they call a G&T, Generation and Transmission Organization. The current TVA and all of their distributors out there in the valley their hundred and forty some distributors are affiliated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Bonding together as a G&T and separating themselves from the government.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Totally.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: There big G&Ts out there in this country and there's a model already there and that way TVA wouldn't change very much that way. I'm a supporter of the Tennessee River and contributors tributaries as the backbone of TVA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: You wouldn't have any power plants if it weren't for that river.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: You got to have the water. You do the transportation aspect and all that's been developed and some of the best clear, best good water reservoirs and rivers in the world, and managed rivers in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: You set up for integrated resource development concept; it's been built and managed that way since. There's a danger of trying to make TVA just a power company where it's public or private, power unit power outfit. And the attention of the quality and the value of that river would deteriorate over time. You know, the country can't get together and do anything about rebuilding and maintaining its infrastructure across the country, TVA is infrastructure particularly targeted for this cause.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: …along this river. So, I'm trying to start a campaign over at TVA and retirees, principles that manufacture, and municipalities, you know that river is their life blood, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. WILLIS: And let's grab ahold of that before it is too late. To insure that we find some structure or method of making sure that that river stays the backbone of this region.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And produces what it can contribute to produce and even do more. There is more that can be done with the river.
MR. MCDANIEL: And TVA is kind of always being the caretaker…
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: …of the Tennessee River. I mean, they've been they've been the one that's felt responsible for the Tennessee River.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, back when I was there to the time some were wanting to get TVA away from any appropriation, appropriations to work on the Works Projects. Power systems always finance themselves.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: The public work navigation system, recreation, forestry, fertilizer, all of these other things it was appropriated money sent down and TVA didn't pay it back. TVA paid back the money the government has put into it for the power system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And not only that, but they have paid it back from day one, up to date. And they also go out into the market and sell bonds, revenue bonds like any other private company to finance the new stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So that Congress decided, about in ‘94 or ‘95 time frame, that some people in Congress wanted to stop making appropriations to TVA all together.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: Time they were getting about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and sixty million dollars a year to maintain all of this stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, so, TVA then had to get out of it. So, we picked it up in the power system maintaining the river and the appropriations part of the river and what's in charge of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And they’re doing that out of the power money now. They didn't have to do that before, but they’re doing that now. And, that could be a dicey issue in a future.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: A private company probably wouldn't pick that up.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: So, at any rate, that's a danger out in the future. This community is with a fair amount of support out of Washington to make this one of their top premiere research institutions in the nation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: If they continue to do that like they have that is nothing but good news for TVA because you'll see even more and more private companies spring out of that research and stuff that's doing here. They want to stay close to the research people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And their building in this area so I see continued growth, but I don't see any more big government paid institution.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. WILLIS: But I don't see that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: And that's, those things, are kind of the path unless we get into a major depression, again.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: The dams all blow up and we have to rebuild all those dams.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: I say TVA’s future is mostly the power, and keeping the power up. They are trying to do as much as they can to get more efficient and get more use of the power so they won't have to spend so much high cost capital to build new facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. WILLIS: From about the middle ‘60s, early ‘70s the whole economics of power development in the valley changed. Up until about 1965 every new facility brought online, every new facility lowered the cost of electricity to the costumers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. WILLIS: After that time with every plant that was brought on increased the price.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. WILLIS: To the people using the power locally.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Past users and new user.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, it's a lot of questions about what our future power electrical sources will be. And, the thing you want to do is cut down as much as you can on having to build high capital cost facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: And, the only way you can do that is to get the current users of electricity to find more efficient ways to use it so they lower the units of kilowatts and demand another system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And, at the same time try to find a way to make electricity more efficient the power producing plants to produce more.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: Well, another thing, at about the end of the ‘60s the economy of scale from the time they first started up to 1960 they built bigger and bigger plants. And the economy of scale made electricity after that, it leveled off. No more increase in size of plants from then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly.
MR. WILLIS: Another thing on the power end of it. TVA used to brag up through the ‘60s into the ‘70s that the people of the Tennessee Valley are the highest users of electricity per capita of any place in the nation. That was good because they got things cheaper, they could do more. More is going on, but now as the cost of power goes up you don't want to use that metric anymore.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: You want them to be the lowest users of electricity in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, that metric that we used to brag on we don't brag on that anymore. We want to say now we are the most efficient user of electricity because what we are trying to do now is avoid having to make big capital expenditures to renew facilities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: Because it's going to cost more.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. WILLIS: So, that's a big change that occurred sometime around 1970. We've continued working on and I think they are doing a good, a real good job on that right now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. So, since you retired as General Manager what, and you said you spent about eight years or so in the private sector. But you're still involved in TVA.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And Oak Ridge.
MR. WILLIS: Yeah, I do some talks for them. They get me to go do talks or I still get called on to say, why did you all make that stupid decision back when you were [in charge].
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. WILLIS: It's causing me a problem today.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure. Right, right.
MR. WILLIS: But, I do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Some things you can't live down.
MR. WILLIS: I just recently went to Memphis and gave a talk to the National Civil Engineers organizations in Memphis to a big crowd.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. WILLIS: I had a lot of fun doing that. I do the thing like the documentary. I got involved in that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. WILLIS: And, I got some more coming up, I forgot what they are. But occasionally they'll call for me when they can't find anyone who can remember what happened, you know, say, “Why? What went on there? Who did what?”
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. WILLIS: Usually I was involved in it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, how funny. That's good. Well, thank you so much for taking to talk to me this afternoon.
MR. WILLIS: I really enjoyed it. I look forward to seeing your documentary. You got an unbelievable pile of wealth and knowledge over here to help you put together a great story. It's a community of just unbelievable talent, and knowledge, and so forth.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Sure.
MR. WILLIS: You're going to have a good time doing this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
MR. WILLIS: Okay.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at Mr. Willis’ request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]